Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  To which our Italian might have answered “Si!” and torn off his wicked trinkets and been saved or kept his trinkets and muttered “Vaffanculo!” and remained as Lost as ever.

  But this never happened. In all the years of witnessing, while on vacation we never saved one cornuto-wearing Italian, though several Italians, including the aforementioned Dino (and Lorna if you count English wives married to Italians), did come to L’Abri and returned to Dark, Lost Italy and started a home church in Milan. “But, sadly,” as Mom once said, “even Dino still wears a medallion of some ‘saint,’ so I’m not entirely sure about him.”

  Dad preached at L’Abri’s Milan branch once a month. He always purchased an excellent Motta Panettone (the cake typical of Milan usually prepared for Christmas) while passing through the Milan station. Panettone is a fine dry airy concoction that’s so light and fluffy it melts in your mouth. Eating the treasured wedge Dad offered me, like some sort of Dad-coming-home sacrament, gave me a lifelong sensory association with the words “reaching the Italians for Christ” and the taste of candied orange. Any time I hear those words, I can taste candied fruit and even get a whiff of the cigarette smell Dad always carried home on his clothes after his long train ride. And even now any time I eat Panettone, I can’t help but think about the Lost Italians.

  Anyway, unaware that his medallions had given him away and blithely oblivious to his impending doom on Judgment Day and/ or if the pizza oven exploded right then and there, our Very Lost Italian just smiled, then wandered off with a transitive-verb-type shrug (i.e., to raise the shoulders, especially as a gesture of doubt, disdain, or indifference).

  Once his back was turned to us, Mom shuddered, thereby directing my attention to his bottom and how the Lost Man’s Speedo was riding up and down. This caused a sharp disapproving intake of breath by my mother since we could all see the Top Of His Crack and the twin-crescent-moon-like Lower Parts of his Bottom’s Cheeks protruding beneath the all-too-brief briefs, with the suntan-line-demarcated Very White Cheek Flesh winking slyly at us as he walked away.

  During these demonstrations Dad stayed away. In our presophistication days, Mom often chided him for his cold heart when it came to Reaching Out To The Lost in public places. But back then Dad did carry tracts with him, which he’d scatter anonymously, sort of like rabbit droppings in a garden, evidence of the rabbit but with no actual rabbit there to confront the consequences for the missing lettuce (or in Dad’s case, the nonbiodegradable Jesus litter).

  Throughout my early childhood, we Schaeffers were busy littering train seats, café tables, and assorted telephone booths all over Switzerland, Italy, and the rest of Europe with four- and five-page luridly illustrated little booklets “in the local language in case someone is led to read it,” as Dad said. They had titles in French and Italian, such as “What Must I Do to Be Saved?” or “Is There a Heaven and Hell?” and “Where Will I Spend Eternity?” Sometimes as our train roared through Italian or Swiss towns, Dad would fling handfuls of tracts from the train window at astonished passersby.

  My lack of zeal for evangelizing worried me. My reluctance to witness always conjured up Jesus’ dire warning: “But whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:33). To even be inwardly embarrassed was a denial. I knew God saw the nine-year-old version of me hiding behind the snack bar, wedged between the jukebox and the pile of folded deck chairs when Mom declared open season on The Lost. Not only had I not done enough to save some Lost Soul; I’d also let Jesus down in the Battle of the Heavenlies! “See!” Satan would say to God while laughing nastily and pointing down at me where I was trying to shrink into myself or (chameleonlike) meld with the pavement. “Your servant Frank Schaeffer is only pretending to sing along with his mother! He’s moving his lips, but do you hear his voice? No! And why not? Because he doesn’t really love you!” Another nail driven into my Lord’s hands and feet by my Sins: in this case, my lack of enthusiasm combined with a timid lip-sync demonstration in the vain hope that the pretty eleven-year-old English girl I’d just met the day before on the beach—and who Had Actually Smiled At Me Even After She’d Met Mom—would not hear my voice, identify it, turn, and see me standing with my family singing.

  Besides evangelizing, we Schaeffers did our small part to help God win the Battle Of The Heavenlies by wearing modest bathing suits. Dad and I wore long boxer-shorts-style suits—not skintight, genital-outlining Speedos. Our women wore 1950s-type skirted suits, which gave the swimsuit the look of a child’s playsuit with a nice modesty skirt (or ruffle) to block one’s view of the important-to-always-hide (vicinity of) that Most Private Place.

  In contrast to Us Real Christians, The Lost wore ever-smaller bathing suits each year. And our modest-bathing-suit-wearing Mission-To-The-Lost failed. In fact, by the late 1960s some of The Lost started going topless. And their immodest contagion even began to infect America. That’s what hippies and American feminist women were: wannabe French and Italian Topless Pagans trying to turn the whole of heretofore chaste America into a scratch-yourballs-in-public Paraggi beach!

  Those wannabe Europeans in America started to get their way—with the legalization of abortion, the ultimate affront to Christian conservative values. After the Roe v. Wade ruling, Christian America was convinced that the proselytizing shoe was on the other foot. Now it was the secular world that was forcing Us Real Christians to listen to their version of “The Heart of Salvation” and don tiny bathing suits as they evangelized Us God-fearing Americans with the Gospel Of Guiltless Fucking!

  Before 1973, abortion was already being legalized state by state without starting a civil war. No one got shot in 1959 when the American Law Institute (ALI) proposed a model penal code for state abortion laws. The code proposed legalizing abortion for reasons including the mental or physical health of the mother, pregnancy due to rape and incest, and fetal deformity. On April 25, 1967, the governor of Colorado, John Love, signed the first liberalized ALI-model abortion law in the United States, allowing abortion in cases of mental or physical disability of either the child or mother or in cases of rape or incest. No buildings were firebombed, nor did the Republican Party decide to define itself as “pro-life” and fight every election, local, state, and national, by declaring its antiabortion credentials. There were even Southern Baptist leaders on the record as being in favor of abortion rights. For instance, Dr. W. A. Criswell (a two-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention) and my father (in later years) argued over abortion. Criswell was on record saying he didn’t think life began until a baby took his or her first breath.

  Laws were passed in California, Oregon, and North Carolina legalizing abortion, and no one chained himself to any clinic gates. In 1970 New York allowed abortion on demand up to the twentyfourth week of pregnancy. Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller signed a bill repealing the state’s 1830 law banning abortion after “quickening” (the ancient term indicates the initial motion of the fetus as felt by the mother). Rockefeller’s life was not threatened by people nailing up “wanted” posters listing his home address and where his children went to school. Similar laws were passed in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington State without the Democratic Party changing its platform to become thereafter “The Abortion Party” (as Republicans would soon label it).

  By the end of 1972, a total of thirteen states had an ALI-type law, and none had sparked a culture war. Four states allowed abortion on demand, and there were no mass demonstrations, let alone assassinations of doctors. Even ultraconservative Mississippi permitted abortion for rape and incest, while Alabama allowed abortion for the mother’s physical health. Ronald Reagan (albeit somewhat absentmindedly) was pro-choice. No clinics in New York State, Alaska, or California (where abortion was legal) were being bombed.

  On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade. The incremental state-by-state approach to finding a more humane (not to mention realistic) way to deal with unwanted pregnancy than the nefariou
s “back-alley” abortion ended with a smash. In Roe, the right to privacy was discovered to be “broad enough to encompass” a right to abortion. Roe adopted a trimester scheme of pregnancy. In the first trimester, a state could enact no regulation to protect a fetus. In the second trimester, a state could enact some regulation, but only for the purpose of protecting maternal health. In the third trimester, even after viability, 44 a state could (but did not have to) “proscribe” abortion, provided it made exceptions to preserve the life and health of a woman seeking an abortion.

  Then the Doe v. Bolton ruling (also in 1973) defined health to mean “all factors” that affect a woman, including “emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age.” In other words—in practical terms—if you could find a doctor willing to do the deed, abortion was made legal at a stroke in all fifty states, up to the moment before a fully grown baby was born.

  Roe as “refined” by Bolton created the culture wars. This was a “life-and-death” matter sparking raw emotions to match: dead babies pitted against women killed by coat hangers. Unlike debates over prayer in public schools, the right to bear arms, racial issues, and gay rights, Roe offered no middle ground, let alone the psychological space for an incremental adjustment to a new sensitivity to women’s rights. Unlike capital punishment, this issue wasn’t about a few hundred murderers on death row but about everyone’s daughters, wives, mothers, sisters, and girlfriends, not to mention about the fate of every baby conceived from then on.

  As redefined by Bolton, Roe was extreme when compared not only to the heretofore more nuanced and gradual evolution of abortion laws in America but also as compared to the laws defining access to abortion in other Western countries. And Roe was about Sex!

  Matters sexual generate a special sort of heat in Sex-obsessed/ Sex-fearing America. Thus, the 1960s ruckus over the pill and “what it will lead to” was just a foretaste of what the battle over abortion became—and has remained.

  Roe as restated by Bolton fed the passion that has burned within each successive generation of antigovernment protesters since the early 1970s. This has included the rise of the so-called Tea Party movement and the Far Right’s vitriol-laced reaction to President Obama’s twenty-first-century moderate legislative health care reform, including predictions of “Death Panels,” and “government takeover.” Roe even indirectly energized those members of the Far Right who didn’t care about abortion per se or who were pro-choice libertarians. Roe had such far-reaching effects because reactions to Roe and Bolton set the scorched-earth, winner-take-all tone and volume of the political fights since 1973. And given the permissiveness of Roe and Bolton when taken together, they opened the door to a constant stream of news stories about late-term abortions like the following one that has kept antiabortion Americans enraged and the general population (even many pro-choice people) unsettled and queasy.

  As the New York Times reported in January of 2011 (in the context of an article noting that 40 percent of all pregnancies in New York City end in abortion):The vast majority of abortions in New York—88 percent—take place in the first 12 weeks. All but 2 percent take place in the first 20. After that, women’s options narrow. It’s far too late for [abortioncausing] pills, and too late for most OB-GYNS. So, many women are referred to specialists like Dr. Robert Berg, who occupy the outer edge of New York’s abortion landscape, terminating pregnancies up to the legal limit of 24 weeks after conception. The procedure costs about $15,000, some of which is typically covered by insurance, and starts in his office, where he dilates the patient’s cervix to approximate the effects of labor. He describes the process as “quite unpleasant.” A day or two later, in an operating room at NYU Langone Medical Center, Dr. Berg removes the fetus, either intact, using his hands, or “destructively,” using medical instruments. ... Dr. Berg said, some patients seeking late-term abortions are “hostile to me, they’re hostile to my office staff.”

  “I’m just a punching bag,” he added. “I don’t do well with that. Sometimes they won’t even look at me the day of the procedure; they won’t speak to me. That I despise. I really hate that. They were referred to me because I do it safely and expeditiously,” the doctor continued. “To be treated like garbage—and my staff—is really very upsetting.”

  Abortion is complicated, even in New York.45

  The words “abortion is complicated” must be the understatement of all time. The writer might also have added that people’s views on abortion are often more personal than political, let alone strictly rational. In that light, and before offering my opinion on the fight at the heart of our culture wars, I think a disclosure is needed.

  By the age of seventeen I’d either slept with or tried to sleep with or wanted to sleep with every girl with a heartbeat I’d met since I was about twelve. I was a virtual caricature of the irresponsible young male, the type who becomes (as much as anything else) the reason for many women’s need for access to abortion. When I was fifteen, one girlfriend (not Genie) told me I’d gotten her pregnant and demanded that I marry her. (This was in the context of L’Abri, where if you “got someone pregnant,” marriage was the recommended choice to “fix” the “problem.” In Evangelical circles young marriage was not unusual). She said, “I already had two abortions with other boyfriends and won’t do that again.” (She was a nineteen-year-old L’Abri student from America.) I said, “Have another abortion; I’m not marrying you.” She turned out not to be pregnant. But in the “God-sees-the-heart” department, I’d proved that I was just as callous as anyone else.

  When Genie got pregnant two years later, we decided to “keep” Jessica (what an oddly condescending term to use about my daughter). Abortion was not a very real possibility to us given Genie’s and my backgrounds. We were in Switzerland, where in 1969 abortion was illegal. That didn’t mean it wasn’t available. My previous girlfriend had her two illegal abortions in South Carolina in a “back-alley” arrangement, actually from a respectable local doctor, and everyone knew that in Switzerland (even at that time) plenty of private health clinics opened their doors to women “in need.”

  When Genie found she was pregnant and told her parents that she wanted to get married, they told her she could come home and didn’t need to marry. They were Roman Catholics, they were exceptionally kind, and they would have supported her choice to either keep the baby or have it adopted. They also would have made their disapproval of abortion clear.

  Yes, I did love Genie, and she loved me, or at least we each had experienced an intense and passionate teen version of love. And we were living in a community that actually behaved as Jesus instructed His followers to behave when it came to not judging but rather offering unlimited support. We weren’t well off, though; in fact we had nothing but a room full of my paintings and a free place to live. But pre-Roe, perhaps like most people, my parents’ attitude to abortion was one of silent ambivalence. They didn’t approve of abortions (back then few people did, including Planned Parenthood, which in its official publications as late as 1968 called abortion murder). But the “issue” had no heat. It certainly wasn’t political as it was to become and was probably one of those things about which both Mom and Dad would have said, “I wouldn’t do this myself, but if you do, I’d understand even if I advised against it.” I know that they had comforted women who had had abortions (like that previous girlfriend of mine) just as they also cared for many single mothers who’d kept their children.

  Actually, Genie and I never discussed abortion, even when we discovered she was pregnant. All we debated was if we were going to stay together or if Genie would do what her parents wanted and go home to begin college. I guess we assumed that the future of her pregnancy would be decided after Genie’s decision whether to stay with me or not. She’d already partly “voted” for me by having a friend of hers steal her passport out of her mother’s underwear drawer and express-mail it to New York, where Genie had traveled to join me at the first show of my paintings at the Frisch Gallery. You see, she’d
flown home after being in Europe for six months; she was supposed to have been there for three weeks, then stumbled on L’Abri (and me) and stayed.

  Genie had returned to her parents not knowing she was pregnant. And then, after only ten days at home, Genie joined me in New York against her parents’ wishes. Then we headed back to Europe via boat (also against their wishes) and only on the boat did Genie begin to suspect that she might be pregnant. We really didn’t know if we would have the support of my family, let alone the rest of the L’Abri staff. At the time I thought Dad might just get so angry he’d throw us out. In fact, Dad, Mom, and most of the L’Abri people treated us with dignity and compassion.

  For an unmarried Schaeffer child, having Sex was something to be hidden. Sure, my parents knew I’d been chasing any female who moved and I was now sleeping with Genie, but knowing and acknowledging something are two different things. Mom talked about everything related to procreation but fell strangely silent when it came to her son’s actual sex life. The Talks Mom gave me did no good. Informed or not, I was never going to go up to Mom and say, “I need a condom because I’m fornicating.” There was a pharmacy up the road run by people Mom and Dad knew. I was too embarrassed to ask for condoms. And the pill was still something relatively new, and Genie was like me in that she wasn’t about to ask my (or her) parents for an introduction to some doctor to get a prescription. Contraceptives weren’t readily available. You had to ask a grown-up. Besides, Genie and I were like many teens: believers in our exception from consequences.

  Did I choose fatherhood? No, I lived in the moment.

  Was I a good father? No, I was an insecure kid with a temper.

  I slapped my daughter. I also loved Jessica, but there were plenty of days I resented being “saddled” with a child. I’m a better grandfather than I ever was a dad. I don’t think Jessica would have been better off dead, but I was often mean.